Now and then, when I’m reading something new, I say to myself “Holy cow! That should be a movie,” and then I usually add it to a list for some future day when I have time to blog about it. You can read the previous examples, 12 Real Stories Begging for Movie Treatment, and 9 More True Stories That Should Be Movies, or read on for these 7 stories, all prime candidates for the Hollywood treatment. Here are 7 more true stories that should be movies.

In the early morning hours of October 24, 1968, two alarms sounded in the Oscar 1 Launch Control Center. The alarms were OZ, outer zone, and IZ, inner zone, perimeter alerts at the United States Air Force’s Oscar 7 missile silo, down the highway from the Launch Control Center. While OZ alerts were frequently tripped by wildlife at facilities like Oscar 7, IZ alarms were considerably more rare, and simultaneous signals on both systems were nearly unheard of. It was a strong indicator that someone was trespassing on the launch site of one of the world’s deadliest weapons, a Minuteman missile with a nuclear warhead. The Oscar Flight Security Controller, Staff Sergeant William Smith Jr., immediately dispatched a Security Alert Team to investigate.

1816 was known as the Year Without a Summer. Observers in all parts of the globe reported cooler than normal weather, a dry fog that would not dissipate with the wind or rain and a dimmed sun which appeared red even at the height of day. Crops failed in numbers previously unseen and famine, riots, and looting ensued. Typhus epidemics occurred in many European cities, and more than 71-thousand people died. Few in the West understood, however, that the cause of the climate anomaly was a natural disaster that occurred more than a year earlier on the other side of the planet, and that the inclement weather would lead a young woman to create a horror legend which is today, a household name: Frankenstein.

For young people living in the time of the world wide web and the 24 hour news culture, it can be hard to appreciate the reality of a time when newspapers and radio broadcasts were the only official sources for news, but that was the situation in 1938. Television as we know it did not yet exist, and families would gather around their radios after dinner to enjoy music, or a live radio play.

These are some teaser images from a book we’re working on, a photographic history of Fargo featuring present day photos that are reshoots of classic shots from the photographers of the Farm Security Administration. This video incorporates the previous animation I posted featuring old Shanley High School, and several new animations showing “Then and Now” views of downtown with photos by renknowned FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein.